Salma

Salma is a writer of poetry and fiction. Based in the small town of Thuvarankurichi, she is recognised as a writer of growing importance in Tamil literature. Her work combines a rare outspokenness about taboo areas of the traditional Tamil women’s experience with a language of compressed intensity and startling metaphoric resonance. She has faced great adversity – including obscenity charges and violent threats for her erotic poetry, and living locked away by her family – to also become a major political leader and campaigner for women’s rights. She is the subject of an eponymous documentary film by Kim Longinotto. Her debut novel The Hour Past Midnight was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Women Dreaming (tr Meena Kandasamy) is her second novel.